[PD] "computer music" WAS: Re: Pd at a livecoding event on the BBC

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 17 Oct 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

> --- On Sat, 10/17/09, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
>> in the end, people still choose to spend their time with
>> certain art and not certain other art, and this is
>> implicitly a judgement of value. those judgements are both
>> relativables and an implicit necessity of the art world.
>> [...]
>
> There are plenty of reasons one might spend their time with certain art 
> and not certain other art, without making an implicit judgment about 
> artistic value at all

Yeah, my comment was not the whole story, but you know, when you're 
starting back from scratch after «nothing is better than anything else», 
how long and how detailed would you write immediately when you don't know 
whether you will get a reply?

> (area of expertise, access, medical condition, risk aversion to spending 
> one's time examining new works, etc.).  So why do you say this is an 
> "implicit necessity of the art world?"  I don't get it.

Because I'm trying to say that even if everybody claimed that anything is 
as good as anything else, then there are still signs we can extract from 
observing people's behaviour, to figure out what is important to them, 
regardless of the words; and I'd say that this may also be a key concept 
to figure out what's going on when absolutism reigns, because in either 
case, the words "bad" and "good" and "beautiful" and "ugly" (etc) can't be 
used anymore for one's own opinions, as absolutism steals those words and 
total relativism trashes them, which both means that those words aren't 
yours, aren't mine, and they aren't anybody else's.

Those things you are listing, are useful to consider for building new 
definitions of bad/good/beautiful/ugly/etc. There are several kinds of 
definitions that we might want to use, though. I might say that if an 
artwork is hidden from public view, then it makes it less valuable, and 
someone else may say that it makes it more valuable, and someone else may 
say it doesn't matter, and all three will successfully argue for three 
different kinds of value, and all of those ideas are different aspects of 
value in general.

It's really hard to talk about these topics and be clear in that few 
words, though.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801